The course is designed for people that want to learn about the latest development agenda the international community agreed to achieve by 2030. Structured around the five pillars of Agenda 2030 – people, prosperity, planet, peace and justice, and partnership, students will learn that these pillars are interconnected and need to be integrated in practical policy-making and operational activities for development, in both developed and developing country settings. Following an introductory module on the main concepts of Agenda 2030 and the SDGs, successive modules will provide the foundation behind the SDGs for people, prosperity and planet, peace and partnership. A final module will explore the way forward and provide channels that the young generation can participate to integrate the SDGs in the policy-making of the students’ resident countries.
To get a better idea of our course, we welcome you to take a look at our promotional video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KATSb73TeB4

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Apr 11, 2019

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Just mind blowing.. A paradigm shift. A must for every leader

From the lesson

Peace & Partnership

This week we will discuss the 16th Sustainable Development Goal to “Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels.” This week will cover the concepts of justice, inclusion, peace, global governance and global citizenship and the need for strong institutions.

Taught By

Ban Ki-moon

Transcript

[MUSIC] Hello everyone. Now we are in week five, so you are pros on sustainable development goals in your city or your town. Since there are still many people who do not know about SDGs. Let's step back for a second and think about the usefulness of having a goal. You've probably had a few or many mornings or evenings where you've sat down about what kinds of goals you want to achieve. Indeed, having a goal or a set of goals helps us to direct our limited attention or effort. Facility planning of future steps motivates us to take certain actions and to evaluate and conduct performance checks. That is why, when the open working group on the SDGs met several times before, the goals were reviewed and agreed upon in 2015. And the open working group discussed about what kind of framework should be established for monitoring the progress of SDGs implementation. Monitoring has indeed become more complex since the NTGs, which had 8 goals and 21 targets and 60 indicators. In comparison, under the SDG framework we currently have 17 goals. 169 targets and 230 indicators. The focus of all these SDGs track record is actually at the national level, since each country knows best about which SDGs are most important or should be prioritized in order to achieve sustainable development. Since countries may differ in their capacity to deliver on certain goals, partnerships among all these countries become important so that they can collaborate and share progress to ensure accountability monitoring at a global level. Another way of fostering partnership or monitoring is not only among nations but also among experts on each theme of SDGs. In this case, instead of governments, other stakeholders can take on the leadership role to monitor the progress of SDGs. Specialized international organizations can utilize their expertise, spread across the globe to track indicators and ensure accountability. Since international organizations often track not just the outcome, but also the input into the development projects, and the processes involved to deliver the outcomes, we can obtain more holistic information about a certain issue. For example, the UN Interagency Group on Child Mortality Estimation developed a specialist hub responsible for analyzing, checking and improving child mortality estimation. This interagency is led by the United Nations Children's Fund, UNICEF and the World Health Organization, WHO. And the World Bank Group, and the UN Population Division of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs also participated. Together they formed a database called the CME Info, which is a leading source for information about child mortality for both governmental and non-governmental actors. Another group that could carry a similar function is Sustainable Energy for All Initiative, which has announced a global tracking framework run by a multi-agency team to monitor the progress of three main initiatives of sustainable energy for all. First, universal access to modern energy services. Second, double global rate of improvement of energy efficiency. Last but not least, double the share of renewable energy in the global energy mix. The World Bank's Energy Sector Management and the International Energy Agency worked with 13 other agencies, varying from research institutes, NGOs and UN agencies. To name a few, Practical Action UNDP, UNEP, WHO, World Energy Council, UNIDO and IRENA collaborated to not only collect data on access to electricity, but also about how source access to clean cooking, energy intensities of different sectors of the economy and different sources of final energy consumption. In some cases, universities are playing a leading role in thematic monitoring, such as the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, which has become a leading and internationally trusted resource on key public health data. Another university that launched the database with the help of WHO and the Belgium government was the School of Public Health of Université Catholique de Louvain, which maintains the EM-DAT database on natural disasters and technological disasters. Since research is one of the many functions that universities deliver, we can expect to more universities to play an important role to close in on the data gaps for SDG indicators. Similarly, NGOs like Transparency International are playing an important role in collecting and vetting critical data that require sustained interest about a specific issue. Transparency International collects data about perceptions of corruption from more than 10 institutions, such as the African Development Bank and Freedom House, that rank multiple countries on the same scale. Using these different data sources on business people opinion surveys or performance assessments, transparency international constraints, the corruption perceptions index to provide information about the level of corruption in each country. In other cases, businesses may have access to data that can underpin thematic esteemed monitoring. For example, data from company supply chains can help track food loss and waste. And ICT companies can share data on the use of modern communication technologies across the world. Since there are so many stakeholders that can contribute to collecting data on the progress of SDGs, you may be wondering, who is going to be in charge of organizing all this data? The United Nations Statistical Commission created the interagency and expert group on SDG indicators to develop and implement the global indicator framework for the SDGs and targets of the 2030 agenda. Indicators have been categorized into three groups. Tier one indicator is conceptually clear, had an internationally established methodology and standards are available. And data are regularly produced by countries for at least 50% of countries and all the population in every region where the indicator is relevant. Tier two group is when the indicator is conceptually clear, has an internationally established methodology and standards are available, but data are not regularly produced via countries. Tier three is no internationally established methodology or standards are yet available for the indicator. But methodology and standards are being or will be developed or tested. One point you may have noticed is the importance of collecting the appropriate data for the SDGs. While national statistical offices are responsible for collecting data, they may have limited capacity to collect data about marginalized groups, specifically about how they have been marginalized and what their needs and priorities are. In such cases, household surveys may need to be extended so that not only the heads of households are interviewed. But also other members of the household are interviewed as well. If you are interested in education outcomes, conducting a survey at schools may give us an incomplete picture about the status of education in the country. We would have missed information about students not attending schools. In that case, we would need to compliment enrollment data with other administrative data available and helpful surveys to gain a fuller picture to understand the extent of learning inequalities. Since we're living in the age of the theatre revolution, another great way to ensure leaving no one behind in monitoring SDGs is to integrate data from multiple sources, such as just spacial information, cell phone records, social media and other citizens innervated data. National averages and even city averages can hide wide disparities among population groups. If national datasets can be complemented with these other sources of data, we may be able to ensure the needs and the progress of vulnerable groups. There's still much room for improvement to foster innovation and engagement to strengthen data collection and dissemination for monitoring progress of SDGs. If you set good standards and promote best practices in data collection, then big data can help us to understand how much we have come since the enactment of SDGs and where we need to be headed whether at the local level or the global level.

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